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APA San Francisco (Fri): The Question of Torture

2007/08/17 23:55
APA Welcome to San Francisco
Well, the annual APA convention has gotten underway in San Francisco at its usual venue downtown, the Moscone Center South (and West) plus some of the local hotels. I've been out in this area of California since almost the beginning of the month and, for the last week, have been visiting friends in the City. It has been an extraordinary August, so far: the fog has been minimal or absent in the mornings and the rest of the days have been sunny and warm. A rebuke to the supposed remark of Mark Twain ("the coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco") which he may or may not have said.
  
The pressing issue of this convention turns out to be the question of the torture of prisoners by the United States government's forces in places like Guantanamo Bay, the involvement of psychologists in developing or advising about interrogation techniques which are torturous, and the ethical lapses or failures of both these psychologists and the American Psychological Association itself in rejecting such activities. My first session this morning involved a symposium/discussion on the topic: "Ethics and Interrogations-Confronting the Challenge: What Does the Research on
Panel on Ethics & Interrogations @ APA
Interrogations Tell Us?" The room for this session was both filled with listeners and a host of people from the media who are here to cover the conference's various sessions on this topic. Indeed, I don't think in the 20+ years I have been attending APA meetings I have ever seen as many reporters and writers as I did today. Mark Costanzo (Claremont-McKenna) led off by describing what we know about coersive interrogation techniques and false confessions in the forensic/criminal justice world. He demonstrated the frequent occurrence of false confessions and the inability of the interrogators to identify when suspects are lying or not. Charles Morgan (Yale Medical School) offered a defense of many techniques and quibbled with notions like "do no harm" or objections to coersion, deception, and other similar issues which, he claimed, physicians routinely carry out in order to help their patients. He was later attacked by an questionner from the audience as a apologist for the government. Shara Sand (Yeshiva) read through the report of the Office of the Inspector General of the Defense Department about the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistence, and Escape) program and its supposedly sole use as a defensive, rather than offensive instrument by the American military. She detailed the connection between recent work on programs like SERE and early work (in the 1950s) on brainwashing and mind control by the CIA and DOD under the help and direction of psychologists and other behavioral specialists, the so-called MKULTRA program. Finally, Phil Zimbardo (Stanford) gave an incredibly lively and empassioned talk on the history of interrogation research (including his own very early, but ignored work in the 1950s) and made a sharp distinction between the positive findings of social psychology on how to foster rapport and a willingness to confess by suspects and the uniformly negative findings about interrogations employing coersive and abusive techniques. These, he stressed, regularly result in poor information and are often utterly a waste of time. The moderator/chair of the symposium, Bradley Olson (Northwestern), offered somewhat extended comments after each speaker despite his disclaimer that he would not be an "activist chair" (though he was). And while I agreed with many of his points, the structure of these off-the-cuff comments tended to wander and seemed to be out of place.

Demonstration against Torture @ APA San Francisco Meeting
APA: San Jose Says Stop the Torture

Later in the day, there was a demonstration in the Yerba Buena Gardens across from Moscone South by Psychologists for an Ethical APA. The crowd it attracted seemed to me to consist of about 200-300 pretty committed and enthusiastic. On Sunday morning, the APA Council of Representatives is going
APA Coersion is the Cloak of Cowards APA Psychologists for an Ethical APA APA A.P.A.THETIC traitors, Torture is Wrong
to take up a resolution which moves toward (but not quite endorse) the notion that there should be a moratorium by psychologists cooperating with the government in detainee interrogations (see these documents on this matter submitted to APA). The rest of the convention is going to have programming detailing different aspects of this topic (Ethics and Interrogation) through to Monday afternoon. It will be intriguing to see what the final outcome is going to be. Stay tuned.

Eyewitness Testimony Again Challenged

2007/07/23 22:50
A new story by Adam Liptak in the New York Times (behind the TimesSelect wall) entitled, "Story of Wrongful Convictions Raises Questions Beyond DNA" points once again to the weakness of "eyewitness" testimony. As the story notes:

Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false — yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.“A few types of unreliable trial evidence predictably supported wrongful convictions,” Professor Garrett concluded in his study, “Judging Innocence,” to be published in The Columbia Law Review in January.

The articles goes on to say that

The leading cause of the wrongful convictions was erroneous identification by eyewitnesses, which occurred 79 percent of the time. In a quarter of the cases, such testimony was the only direct evidence against the defendant.

Once again, naive belief in the accuracy or superiority of so-called "eyewitness" testimony is shown to be dangerous and grossly misplaced.

Target Article: Liptak, A. (2007, July 23). Study of wrongful convictions raises questions beyond DNA. New York Times (Electronic version).